Also heavily involved was Raul Gorrin, one of the owners of television station Globovisión since May 2013, who allegedly paid bribes to Andrade in order to obtain profitable currency exchange contracts. According to a newly unsealed indictment, Gorrin paid over $150 million in bribes between 2008, when he bought insurance firm Seguros La Vitalicia, and 2017.

Globovisión was a fiercely anti-Bolivarian television network prior to 2013, having played a leading role in the failed 2002 coup attempt against Chávez and later facing a long series of lawsuits and sanctions from the government. The stations previous majority owner, Guillermo Zuloaga, fled to Miami in 2010 after a court issued a warrant for his arrest for usury and conspiracy in connection to his car dealership enterprise.

Globovisión defended itself on free speech grounds that were sometimes questionable. In a September 2009 cable published by Wikileaks, for example, the US Ambassador to Venezuela, Patrick Duddy, acknowledged that “Globovision is clearly playing with fire by broadcasting incendiary messages, which undermine its credibility and legitimacy and risk giving Chavez a stronger and more compelling excuse for shutting it down.”

In another cable, from February 2010, Duddy reported that “relentless Venezuelan Government (GBRV) pressure … has threatened to put [Globovision and other outlets] out of business,” with the result that Globovisión had pushed out Alberto Federico Ravelli, the station’s Director, and “tone[d] down [its] strongly anti-Chavez orientation.”

The upshot here is that one of the new Globovisión owners was deeply corrupt during the period when Venezuela’s economy began to unwind. And that unwinding resulted significantly, if not primarily, from mismanagement of the currency exchange system that was so deeply corrupted. This is not a good look for the Bolivarian government. It lends further credence to claims that the government used non-democratic means to constrain non-aligned press outlets and thus shape debate in the public sphere.

Globovisión has had much to answer for and there’s a legitimate argument that its actions in 2002, if not after, merited greater and more immediate sanctions. The Bolivarian government’s response, however, should have proceeded through formal and transparent democratic mechanisms. Forcing the sale of Globovisión to a corrupt ally is not consistent with the principles of liberal democracy, much less twenty-first century socialism.